Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) Read Online Free Page B

and his students adored him. They called themselves Deweenies and wore skull-and-crossbones T-shirts to class. People were mad for Jack in this town. Once, in a grocery store, when Miriam stood gazing into a bin of little limes, a woman came up to her and said, “Your Jack is a wonderful, wonderful man.”
    “Oh, thanks,” Miriam said.
    “My son Ricky disappeared four years ago and some skeletal remains were found at the beginning of this year. Scattered, broken, lots of bones missing, not much to go on, a real jumble. The officials told me they probably weren’t Ricky’s but your Jack told me they were, and with compassion he showed me how he reached that conclusion.” The woman waited. In her cart was a big bag of birdseed and a bottle of vodka. “If itweren’t for Jack, my Ricky’s body would probably be unnamed still,” she said.
    “Well, thank you very much,” Miriam said.
    She never knew what to say to Jack’s fans. As for them, they didn’t understand Miriam at all. Why her of all people? With his hunger for life, Jack could have chosen better, they felt. Miriam lacked charm, they felt. She was gloomy. Even Jack found her gloomy occasionally.
    Mornings, out in the garden, she would, at times, read aloud from one of her many overdue library books. Dew as radiant as angel spit glittered on the petals of Jack’s roses. Jack was quite the gardener. Miriam thought she knew why he particularly favored roses. The inside of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty. If one tears off all the petals of the corolla, all that remains is a sordid-looking tuft. Roses would be right up Jack’s alley, all right.
    “Here’s something for you, Jack,” Miriam said. “You’ll appreciate this. Beckett described tears as ‘liquefied brain.’”
    “God, Miriam,” Jack said. “Why are you sharing that with me? Look at this day, it’s a beautiful day! Stop pumping out the cesspit! Leave the cesspit alone!”
    Then the phone would ring and Jack would begin his daily business of reconstructing the previous lives of hair and teeth when they had been possessed by someone. A detective a thousand miles away would send him a box of pitted bones and within days Jack would be saying, “This is a white male between the ages of twenty-five and thirty who didn’t do drugs and who was tall, healthy and trusting. Too trusting, clearly.”
    Or a hand would be found in the stomach of a shark hauled up by a party boat off the Gulf coast of Florida and Jack would be flown off to examine it. He would return deeplytanned and refreshed, with a crisp new haircut, saying, “The shark was most certainly attracted to the rings on this hand. This is a teen’s hand. She was small, perhaps even a legal midget, and well nourished. She was a loner, adventurous, not well educated and probably unemployed. Odds are the rings were stolen. She would certainly have done herself a favor by passing up the temptation of those rings.”
    Miriam hated it when Jack was judgmental and Jack was judgmental a great deal. She herself stole on occasion, mostly sheets. For some reason, it was easy to steal sheets. As a girl she had wanted to become a witty, lively and irresistible woman, skilled in repartee and in arguments on controversial subjects, but it hadn’t turned out that way. She had become a woman who was still waiting for her calling.
    Jack had no idea that Miriam stole sheets and more. He liked Miriam. He liked her bones. She had fine bones and he loved tracing them at night beneath her warm, smooth skin, her jawbone, collarbone, pelvic bone. It wasn’t anything that consumed him, but he just liked her was all, usually. And he liked his work. He liked wrapping things up and dealing with those whom the missing had left behind. He was neither doctor nor priest; he was the forensic anthropologist, and he alone could give these people peace. They wanted to know, they had to know. Was that tibia in the swamp Denny’s? Denny, we long to